Archive for the ‘man from uranus’ Category

I was lucky cos the first people who ever played me a load of YouTube videos one after the other for caned laffs were Noah Lennox & Ariel Rosenberg, which is kinda funny when you think about it. 2005, I suppose. My good fortune continues now that Man From Uranus lives downstairs as he is quite the maestro of the stream and even has a screen/projector combo for maximum auteurship of the webjollies. Anyway, the other night he had me in the usual state of disbelief/delight at the following clips:

Some people assert that the Man From Uranus ouevre, being at least in part reliant on the artistic fiction of a cosmological backdrop, lacks some sort of philosophical weight. Personally I think this view is, quite frankly, spacist.

In other cool news Dave & I watched the Sensational film last night and it’s great & I am totally in it, which makes me really proud and embarassed at the same time. Dave is the original fan round here though, and he’s really kept the faith over the years. I should do a proper blog about that actually. Remind me to do that. And go and buy the Nochexxx/Sensational record on Werk. It’s fucking great.

Today I bought:

“Cocaine” Dillinger
“In Praise Of Learning” Henry Cow (that’s the pick of the bunch right there)
“Marquee Moon” Television (I do have two copies already but it was in good nick and it’s on Discogs right now.
“Love Bites” Buzzcocks
“Shape Of Things To Come” The Kinks (10″!)
“Don’t Break My Heart” UB40 7″ (I think this tune has a charming weirdness, so fuck you).
“Loving You” Minnie Ripperton. (Figure I might get to play this at the end of some messy night one day).

When I went up to the counter the bloke said “hello dynamite” and I gave him a weird smile because I thought he was talking to me and not whoever had just walked through the door behind me.

First off, the marvellous Russell Taysom has made good on a promise and done one of his joyously dark illustrations of me, here seen feasting on the head of Man From Uranus. To me he’s captured Phil rather better than he has me but then it’s hard to judge a likeness of oneself (perhaps indicative of the distance between subjective and objective realities with regards to ourselves) and as I can’t deny the formless hair and the lines around the eyes and as Syd seemed to think it was pretty obviously me I am overall very chuffed to be the latest to be granted this honour. Besides, as Russell pointed out, Phil is instantly recognizable by his blue skin.

The next cool thing is that I received a copy of the latest album by the Flower-Corsano Duo, which has a nice big Pete Um credit on the back simply because I was pointing my camera towards the stage at The Portland one night. In fact The Doozer did as much as me with helping out with that one. Anyway, big fan of all things Corsano so it feels like a really cool thing to me.

And talking of fandom, it seems my online big-up of unique hip-hop legend Sensational, you know, this one:

might find its way in part into a documentary about the man. I am fucking chuffed about this, no two ways about it.

Been capturing, rendering and uploading like some kind of unemployed motherfucker over the past few days, so I thought I would draw attention to some of the slightly over-ripe fruits of my dubious labours. To wit, as above, the gig Phil and I played with Brain Of Morbius in Bern in September of 2003. I wrote about the short trip at length here. Make sure you read the three posts after that one too. Well, you don’t have to, but you know what I mean.

I’ll post some video stills next but Firefox is giving me voodoo so I can’t do it on this post.

Describe your music.
Still can’t do this question. Kinda structureless miniatures of gnostic electronic rock married with metaphysical protest poems. Dada haiku fortune cookie wisdom/Christmas cracker jokes. The pursuit of the ineffable since 1996. Or, to paraphrase Steve Adams’ summarisation: it’s just singing over tapes (of songs that sound like they’ve broken on the way to the speakers).

Which of the other bands on this list do you a) know b) rate c) share members with?
I don’t know The Last Dinosaur, Puncture Repair Kit, The Tupolev Ghost, or Victoria and Jacob, but I know the rest to a greater or lesser extent. Obviously I think all the bands are fabulous and all that but if I was about to be shot and I was allowed to pick one band to play a set in my cell I know I would still smile when Jamie and Andrew (The Vichy Government) shuffled in.

What band/artist should have been on this list, that isn’t?
All my mates that are in bands that you haven’t listed, which I have to say for reasons of diplomacy.

How is your music (if at all) informed by your Cambridgeness?
By osmotic transference. Cambridge appears in my songs now and then, and vice versa.

What has been the best thing your band has achieved, to date?
Puh. Uh… well apart from just getting up and doing it and keeping doing it I suppose I’m proud to have played a lot of gigs over a long time. It’s been nice to play in Europe and have it go well, and it’s great to have done some music that I still feel good about several years down the line. And I’m proud to have produced such a large body or work, even if, as someone once said, they are short songs.

What are your musical aspirations for the future?
I don’t really do aspirational. I would just like to make small runs of records and have similar numbers of people buy them.

Who are your musical influences?
It would be a very long list. Sometimes I think the best musicians sound like themselves though.

What’s good, bad and indifferent about the Cambridge music scene?
It’s a tricky one. I sort of like the localness of being in a band in Cambridge, because there isn’t really a scene in the negative sense of the word. I used to describe myself as a Community Popstar as a jokey comment on Cambridge’s possible insularity and/or my woeful failure to break out of it. There isn’t too much ego or bullshit to being in a band in Cambridge, and audiences are pretty accepting and supporting. The bad thing is that a lot of potential gig-goers are a transient population of students etc, and they may never even make it to The Portland in the first place! Also, you rarely get a sense of energy at Cambridge gigs, or the ones I go to anyway.

Why should we care about you?
You said I should imagine Janet Street-Porter was asking me these questions. To this one I would reply “Shut your teeth, Janet.” Who says I care if you care, even if I do?

Give us the background or an introduction to your track
I like this track because, like some of the best songs, it sort of seemed to almost make itself. I did the music in about 45 minutes and wrote some words about this woman who’d approached me after a gig I’d played the night before to tell me my songs were too short. I have a motto which is “It’s all grist” which means that I would like to think I can co-opt anything for Um purposes. In this case I cheekily provide my attractive critic with her own song, and even though I spent only five minutes in her company I have been told by those who know her well that I captured something about her. Even though there is a sense that the joke is ultimately on the sad musician in the song there is a note of rueful defiance struck by the song’s 1:18 track length.